Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to rise to speak on this bill, the Australia Council Amendment (Creative Australia) Bill 2023, which is one of a number of bills that the government has foreshadowed to implement decisions announced as part of its National Cultural Policy. This is a modest bill which does not achieve a great deal. The two substantive things it does are to rename the Australia Council as Creative Australia and to merge Creative Partnerships Australia with the Australia Council.

Labor launched its National Cultural Policy in January, but it is an underwhelming policy and is not backed by serious new money. Much of what is in the document is simply a reannouncement of things that we knew were already happening. According to the Minister for the Arts, this policy will provide $286 million in additional funding for the arts over four years. However, it's clear from media reports that $45 million of this comes from cancelling the former coalition government's Temporary Interruption Fund. This means that the total new money being provided is around $240 million, and that is over four years, which means that the amount being provided each year is around $60 million. This is conspicuously lower than the 1994 Creative Nation package, which the arts minister has repeatedly referenced. That package committed $252 million in new money. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $525 million in today's dollars.

In fact, what we've seen from the current minister has been, in a number of areas, the cutting of funding to the arts. The previous government, the Morrison government, as part of the March 2022 budget, committed an additional $20 million towards our highly successful RISE program. That money, which could have been put to use within months—indeed, within weeks—of the current government coming to power, was not spent. We then saw a mystifying announcement by the minister, in September, that there would be a COVID-19 Live Performance Support Fund, which was going to provide grants for events such as plays, concerts and festivals over the 2022-23 summer.

The announcement itself was not necessarily mystifying, but what happened subsequent to the announcement was entirely mystifying, because that money never materialised. Recently, under questioning from the opposition in Senate estimates, officials of the department confirmed that the funding set aside for the COVID-19 Live Performance Support Fund—announced with great fanfare by the minister in September—has now been re-allocated, because, to quote the words of the relevant official, 'None of that money rolled out.'

As I have argued, the amount of new funding under the national cultural policy is modest by comparison to previous cultural policies that the minister has repeatedly referenced. It is also extremely modest by comparison to the funding which the Morrison government—the coalition—delivered for the arts. Over 2021-22, our Liberal-National government delivered record arts funding of over $1 billion. No other government, Labor or Liberal, has ever matched this level of funding for the arts, and that has not changed after the announcement of Labor's national cultural policy. It remains the case that the highest level of funding ever delivered in one year for the arts by a Commonwealth government is the funding delivered by our Liberal-National government in 2021-22.

I also highlight the point that we announced a series of new funding commitments for the arts during the 2019-22 term. Let me just mention some of those. We announced the $50 million Temporary Interruption Fund, which allowed Australian screen producers to keep on with productions throughout the COVID period, notwithstanding the fact that private insurers were not willing to provide key person insurance against the risk of a director or a key cast member coming down with COVID. In turn, that meant that screen financing was not flowing. We solved that problem with the $50 million Temporary Interruption Fund. We invested, over that period, more than $370 million for local Australian content through the Australian Children's Television Foundation, through Screen Australia, through the producer offset, through the post, digital and visual effects offset and through the Temporary Interruption Fund. Of course, we invested more than $47 million to digitise and preserve collection materials held by the National Film and Sound Archive and by seven other national collecting institutions. Included within that announcement was funding to continue the operations of the very successful and much-loved Trove digital service, provided by the National Library of Australia.

It's been troubling over recent months to see concerns being raised by many stakeholders that this government has not committed to additional funding to maintain the Trove service beyond 30 June 2023. Our government made the announcement in December 2021 that provided funding certainty through to 30 June 2023. The current government has failed to provide certainty in relation to Trove, and it's yet another example of the sharp contrast between the funding commitments to the arts made by our Liberal-National government when in power and the number of areas under the present government where funding has not been forthcoming.

Of course, we also provided extensive funding across every aspect of the arts sector to support that sector through the pandemic and, in turn, to recover from the pandemic. That included, as I've mentioned, $220 million for the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand Fund, or RISE Fund; the $90 million Show Starter Loan Scheme; $50 million for the Temporary Interruption Fund; and the $53.5 million COVID-19 Arts Sustainability Fund, which supported many of our largest, systemically significant arts companies to survive through the pandemic. We were very conscious that, if any of those companies had collapsed, that would have had an impact across the arts ecosystem. We provided $40 million to the charity Support Act for crisis relief to artists, crew, music and live performance workers across the country; $20 million for the screen program to provide business continuity support to independent cinemas; $21.4 million for regional arts; and $12 million of extra funding for Indigenous arts centres. And there was the very successful Location Incentive program which saw $540 million allocated over seven years to 2026-27 to attract global screen productions to Australia. It was an extremely successful program, and, again, the current government has failed to give any clarity as to whether it intends to continue it.

I simply make the point that, despite all of the hype around the cultural policy released by the minister for the arts, when you look at the dollars, it's clear that our Liberal-National government provided materially greater funding for the arts than the current minister has been able to secure from his cabinet colleagues. The impacts of that on the ground across our arts sector have been very significant. The RISE program funded 541 projects, created over 213,000 job opportunities across Australia and, in turn, offered opportunities for 55 million instances of Australians going to see a performance or a production, or visit an exhibition, or otherwise interact with productions and events that were supported under RISE.

I want to comment specifically on one particular element of the bill before us, noting that what this bill does substantively is pretty modest. Perhaps the most substantive thing that it does is to merge Creative Partnerships Australia with the Australia Council. Creative Partnerships Australia was established over 10 years ago with the aim of attracting more private sector funding to the arts sector. It was established in response to a recommendation of the last cultural policy—one that, again, we heard a lot about from the minister. That was the cultural policy that was released by then arts minister Simon Crean in the midst of the dying agonies of the Gillard Labor government.

One of the recommendations of that policy was that there ought to be established an organisation which would have a specific focus on attracting and encouraging private sector donations to support arts activity, and that is precisely what Creative Partnerships Australia has done during the time of its operations. It is somewhat ironic that one Labor government's cultural policy recommended the establishment of what became Creative Partnerships Australia, and a subsequent Labor government is now abolishing Creative Partnerships Australia and instead rolling its functions into the Australia Council.

There is a risk that the specific role played by Creative Partnerships Australia will get diluted or lost as a result of this merger. The Australia Council has a very different job to that which Creative Partnerships Australia has carried out. The Australia Council's primary focus has been to dispense Commonwealth government funding across the arts sector. That is very different from the job of attracting private sector funding, so I do want to put on the record that the opposition has some scepticism that this will be a productive change.

I also want to note our scepticism about the minister's enthusiasm for adding additional layers of bureaucracy to the Australia Council. There are four new entities being established: the Centre for Arts and Entertainment Workplaces, Music Australia, Writers Australia and the First Nations First body. According to the minister:

These bodies will be critical in building partnerships and expertise that will both support artists directly and benefit Australian audiences.

What they will certainly mean is more taxpayer dollars being spent employing more public servants. Whether that, in turn, will deliver tangible benefits to those who work in the arts and to those who go to performances, those who go to exhibitions, those who consume the services produced by the arts sector, is a question which very much remains to be seen.

The minister is very keen on having this additional collection of cultural commissars. What we also know is that the minister is very keen to use the arts sector as a showcase for his wider agenda of increasing union power and entrenching restrictions on how individual Australians choose to engage in the econom I have no doubt that a number of these cultural commissars who will be employed as a result of the minister adding this additional layer of bureaucracy to the Australia Council will be involved in pursuing the minister's industrial relations agenda and using the arts sector as an exemplar for other Australians to take careful note of.

I make the point that, with all of the excited commentary that we've heard from the minister about the new national cultural policy, there is no new funding for our national collecting institutions within the policy and, instead, the national collecting institutions have been told to wait until the budget. We will wait and see what happens in the budget. But I reiterate the point I made earlier—that our government, the Liberal-National government, provided funding certainty, amongst other things, for Trove through to 30 June 2023, and it's very clear there is great concern across the community amongst the many people who use that service as to whether there will be continuing funding.

I conclude, therefore, by indicating that the coalition will be supporting this bill, but we do note that, first of all, it's a very modest set of measures, very modest indeed. Secondly, there are reasons to be sceptical as to whether the merger of the Australia Council and Creative Partnerships Australia will be successful or whether, in fact, it will have the consequence of a reduction in the effectiveness with which private sector dollars are attracted to support arts activities.

I finally conclude with the observation that, despite all the rhetoric from the current minister, the facts are very clear: the funding dollars committed by the Morrison Liberal-National government to support the arts, first of all, reached a record level in 2021-22 which no other government, Liberal or Labor, has achieved in Commonwealth arts funding and, secondly, show up the gulf between the breadth of the minister's rhetoric—the soaring heights of the minister's rhetoric—on the one hand and the rather less impressive reality as to the actual extent of funding which he has been able to secure from his cabinet colleagues on the other hand.

Debate adjourned.